Harvard Library - Harvard Map Collection
- ️Tue Jan 21 2025
To consult with us about maps or GIS support, please make an online or in person appointment.
To view the paper map collection, please select in-person appointment, and make a HOLLIS Special Request account before your visit.
Searching
Much of our material is in HOLLIS but some is still only in the card catalog, which you can view and search in the digitized card catalog. Explore more collections in our online collections and exhibitions.
Particular strengths of the collection include:
- 18th-century maps of North America and Europe in print and manuscript
- Early modern maps and atlases
- Pictorial maps
- 19th- and 20th-century Topographical maps
To view materials in our reading room or request copies, place requests in HOLLIS through HOLLIS Special Request. You must then schedule an appointment separately. Most materials can be pulled when you arrive. Materials stored off-site will arrive in 1-2 business days.
Upcoming Events
Story Maps by the Harvard Map Collection
Our GIS Librarians can help you through all stages of your digital mapping or spatial analysis project.
- Lend conceptual context and ethics considerations to work that engages with data and mapping technologies.
- Identify and use the spatial data that will enhance your research and teaching.
- Design your analysis to get you to the answers you need
- Select the right software for the project
- Visualize the results
You can find spatial datasets in HOLLIS and the Harvard Geospatial Library. Our map and data tutorials and project examples can also use you get started. Contact us and we can help you find and use any spatial data.
We work with classes every term to incorporate maps and geospatial resources into the curriculum. For each class, we help select maps and data and tailor hands-on activities to your particular course. Classes in the Map Collection have spanned the whole curriculum including Computer Science, History, Earth Sciences, and English.
Our Mission
With experts in spatial analysis, map-making, and historical analysis, we want to help you make the most of the over 500,000 maps and terabytes of data at the Harvard Map Collection. Whether you are analyzing the spatial dimensions of health, making a map about demographics, or tracing changing borders on old maps, we want to find ways to support your work and collaborate on innovative research and teaching.
We collect maps and geospatial data from all time periods and all places in all languages. We are particularly interested in acquiring maps and objects that document how people have used and continue to use maps, whether it be in maps, cartographers’ drafts and journals, artists’ books, or ephemera. We seek out data that helps answer questions about the natural world and the people in it such as census data, population data, and climate information. Then we help analyze that data and bring out new geospatial insights.
Getting Here
You can access our space via a flight of stairs down from ground level at the Pusey Library main entrance or through the Lamont Library west entrance. Access without stairways is available through the Lamont Library main entrance via the ramp at the Quincy Street gate.
Accessibility of the Harvard Map Collection
- The closest accessible entrance to the Harvard Map Collection and Pusey Library is the main entrance to Lamont Library. This entrance can be accessed via Quincy Street and is accessible by automatic door and ramp. There are two elevators that go down to level B of Lamont that connects to Level 1 of Pusey Library and the Map Collection.
- Lamont Library is not open to the public. If you don’t have a Harvard ID please let us know you are coming and will be entering through Lamont so we can alert the guards.
Contact Map Collection staff member Bonnie Burns (bburns@fas.harvard.edu, 617-495-2417) with questions about accessibility of the reading room.
Celebrating Our 200th Birthday!
2018 marked 200 years since the original gift that founded the Map Collection. Read more about it in our online catalog for "Follow the Map: The Harvard Map Collection at 200."